Thumbs4Science
Your media skills interest science!
Thumbs4Science is a data collection project, overseen by the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) since 2016 and financed by the National Research Foundation (FNRS). This project is the result of collaboration between three scientific domains: sociolinguistics, automatic language processing and psychology. It is part of the expansion of the sms4science project, which aimed to collect text messages to be used in scientific research.
Thumbs4Science aims to study the skills of the population that uses modern forms of communication media (social networks, electronic messaging, etc.). Contrary to the ideas circulated by the press and in the education sector, we hypothesise that the use of new media forms in ever younger age groups does not in fact lead to linguistic incompetence (lower levels of spelling, lack of knowledge of grammatical rules, etc.), but rather leads to multi-skills, whereby each speaker would be able to juggle his/her use of language code according to situation, interlocutor and communication method.​ We are also interested in dyslexic students’ written production; what role does phonological awareness play in writing messages for a population of dyslexic students? Can we distinguish SMS productions according to the attainment or preservation of phonological awareness capacities?
Lastly, we are studying the social and psychological skills of the population that uses these new media forms. Have new media forced us to reinvent our methods of communication (how do we deal with silence - lack of response, with physically present people, with people solely present via forms of media…)? Are we reinventing our way of communicating at work or in the classroom? Is there a certain emotional competence that allows us to more effectively verbally manage our relationships with others, our ‘media-based popularity’, as well as embarrassing or unpleasant situations on social networks?
MoodWalk, a company that specialises in behavioural sciences, helps us to answer these questions through an Emotional Intelligence Test that offers a personalised profile to all participants.
About the Project
Coordinating Team
FNRS Postdoctoral Researcher
Professor of Linguistics
Professor of Psychology
Louise-Amélie is in charge of the Thumbs4Science project. She is a sociolinguist and has been studying the impact of the use of new media on everyday practices, particularly those related to language, for almost 10 years. She also looked into the role of new technologies in teaching (see the TedX).
Moïra is the director of research and intervention in socio-emotional competence (iLab). Her research focuses on emotional competence (see TedX) and she is particularly interested in how this can affect health and interpersonal relationships, as well as how emotional competence can be improved.
Cédrick is the director of the Centre for Automatic Language Processing (Cental). His research focuses on the extraction and categorisation of medical, pedagogical and media-related information. He is equally interested in the creation of dictionaries, such as DicAupro, an automatic and philological dictionary of French expressions.
Scientific Collaborators
Andrea Pizarro Pedraza
MOVE-IN Post-Doctorate Researcher
Andrea is aiming to establish a sociolinguistic study on sexual taboo. She is studying semantic strategies (metaphors, metonymies, vague language, etc.) used by speakers to express taboo concepts in a restricted communication situation. She is also interested in the links between language and emotions, as well as the manipulation of meaning in discourse.
Participate in a survey on the words and expressions used in French from our regions! Do you have 10 minutes to spare and would you like to help us to better understand how French words and pronunciation from our regions travel, survive or disappear? Simply click on the link and have fun!
The Quel français régional parlez-vous ? project
MoodWalk
Moodwalk’s mission is to promote the work of behavioural science researchers by offering them a new means of expression: digital. Thanks to an eclectic and versatile team, Moodwalk familiarises science in order to make it accessible to all, everywhere.
Private and Institutional Partners
Hugues is a Professor at UCL and a sociologist specialising in the field of education. His topics of research focus on inequality in schools, the use of information and communication technology by youths, and school policies and organisations.
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Professor of Sociology
Hugues Draelants
Valibel Research Centre
The Valibel – Discourse and Variation Centre proposes an integrated approach to language as a complex phenomenon in which the various levels of analysis are interconnected, whether in the area of the most basic of linguistic units (intonational unit, lexeme) or in that of the most elaborate ones (discourse, verbal interaction).
Louise-Amélie Cougnon
Cédrick Fairon
Moïra Mikolajczak
Rachel Panckhurst
Senior lecturer in Computational Linguistics
Émilie Massot
Master's Student
Professor of Language Sciences
Gudrun Ledegen
Antonine Goumi
Lecturer in Learning and Cognitive Psychology
Rachel is a member of the Praxiling UMR 5267 CNRS Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 research laboratory. Her research interests include mediated discourse analysis and pedagogical issues related with eLearning. She was responsible for the sud4science project and corpus, available here and there.
Gudrun Ledegen is a Professor of Linguistics at the University Rennes 2 (France). She works on syntactic variation in French, contact linguistics and youth usage of SMS and chat discussions.
Antonine works at University Paris Nanterre and is a member of the CHArt laboratory (Cognitions Humaine et Artificielle EA 4004). She studies the use of text messages by adolescents and, in particular, the relationship between text message writing, literacy skills and creativity. Her research interests are related to technologies and education.
Emilie is our relay in France!
As part of her Master's Degree in Communication and Practice in Internet Contexts at the University Rennes 2, Emilie is studying the use of emojis in conversations by instant messaging systems.